


beat

by TomBowline



Series: inferno [2]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Mob, Anal Sex, Blood, First Meetings, First Time, Injury, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Unsafe Sex, also just kind of like., both in the traditional sense and in the sense that theyre both injured, internalized bottomphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:05:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27210145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: “It’s not broken,” the man said softly. “I tweaked something out, maybe a tendon. Bad form is all. They got me off guard.”“We can go to mine,” Sol offered - a bit thickly, through the blood still pulsing sluggish over his lips and into his beard. “I can sort you out, I’ve been a Marine.”Sol meets a man at a bar fight.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Series: inferno [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1986475
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17
Collections: Hickeyshipping 2020





	beat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [attheborder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/gifts).



Sol was all sensation. 

First of all his own - the ringing in his ears, the smarting of his fists, the blood pouring hot and basic down his face. The numb ache in his nose that he knew would only get worse. 

Second, there was sensation shared. The man standing beside him, watching the cabs full of drunks pass by at the belly-bit of the night (not too early, not too late - a good time for a fistfight that gets you thrown out of a pub and still time enough after to eat or drink or fuck elsewhere), was cradling his left wrist in his right and breathing unevenly. He was oddly calm for a man in as much pain as he must be in - face immobile, muscles fairly slack - but Sol could feel his shivering breaths where they pressed together at the shoulder, could just hear the subdued little gasps of his inhales. 

He didn’t regret the fight. Didn’t regret it when he joined, jumping in to defend a man half the size of his opponents. Didn’t regret it when he got cracked across the face - glancing blow, but the ring on the bloke’s finger set something in his nose off balance. Didn’t regret it when he laid the two wankers out cold on the sticky floor. Didn’t regret it when he was scruffed by the bouncer and marched out into the loose London night. Regretted it least of all, now that he was sizing up the man whom he had assisted (rescued). Slight and slim, he was, slicked hair and red mustache and a flashy wide-collar shirt in garish wallpaper patterns that bared his long neck to the night air. Unremarkable features made striking by their combination. A good pull, if Sol could swing it. 

Another night, he might not try. The mess of honor and shame and masculinity within him was rarely amenable to nights of clandestine sodomy. But he was humming with adrenaline now, blood singing after the fight, all thought wiped clean to be replaced with blood and sweat and instinct. He was willing to take a risk. 

“Let’s see, then,” he said gruffly, reaching over to palpate the man’s joint gently. His pulse was going gangbusters inside that soft skin of his. “Doesn’t feel broken.”

“It’s not,” the man said softly. Sol didn’t wonder how he knew. Didn’t wonder too much. “I tweaked something out, maybe a tendon. Bad form is all. They got me off guard.”

“We can go to mine,” Sol offered - a bit thickly, through the blood still pulsing sluggish over his lips and into his beard. “I can sort you out, I’ve been a Marine.” He could have said more - _I’ve seen worse than that in my time_ , delivered in a light tone with a cheeky reassuring smile - but it would open a door that Sol generally preferred to keep shut tight. So he left it there, making his face confident, letting his eyes wander.

The man raised one eyebrow, explored the inside of his flushed cheek with his tongue, and Sol knew he had it. 

“A Marine? Well. Perhaps I ought to keep you around.” The remark was just flirtatious enough that Sol could happily overlook the core of it, the tone he couldn’t quite read. “Lead on.”

•••

In the stark overhead light of Sol’s little flat the man was just as calm as he had been under the flagging orange streetlight outside the pub. He’d been clinging to Sol’s arm the whole walk over - Sol suspected it was more to do with the physical closeness this afforded them than with any real weakness from the fight, but he had been only too happy to carry him home - and now he had detached only to drape all five feet and change of himself into the corner of Sol’s little sofa. Intricately stitched leather boots on Sol’s battered coffee table. Head tipped back against Sol’s nan’s quilt across the sofa-back. Sol shook himself and went to rummage in the kitchen. 

He came back (vaguely noticing that the overhead had been switched off and his floor lamp switched on) with a bag of frozen veg, a roll of bandage, and a little bottle of pills - he’d taken one already to smooth out the pain in his nose, so he figured he should offer. The man smiled to see them, but shook his head. 

He still held his wrist close, but extended it easily when Sol moved to pull it into his lap. He was silent as Sol saw to him, certainly more peaceful a patient than Sol had ever had to treat previously, but Sol could feel his eyes on him keenly. 

When it was done - and really, there wasn’t much Sol could do but wrap it straight and have him hold the ice on for awhile - Sol slid a hand up the man’s arm, around to his flank. He dipped his head in close, breath hot, voice low. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” 

But the man pulled back. “No,” he said, “Not seriously. But you are.” He reached his good hand up and cupped the side of Sol’s face, looking suddenly the picture of concern where a moment before he had had no expression in particular. “Let me clean you up? It’s the least I could do.”

Sol could only nod. 

The man patted his face and slipped off to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a wet-down rag. He situated himself back in his corner, set his soft fingertips to Sol’s face to turn it his way. Fixed his gaze on Sol’s tender nose, his blood-caked beard, his painted lips. Sol felt pierced, somehow, by those eyes on him so closely. He couldn’t work out whether or not it was a pleasant feeling. 

The first touch of the rag was gentle, relaxing despite the cold dampness of it. It was his chin first - wiping softly, then scrubbing harder to get the dried stuff out. Then the man moved up, warm fingers under cold cloth, to coax the blood from his broad cheeks, his scruffy whiskers. 

Sol expected to feel the man’s fingertips over his lips next - to fight the urge to greet them with his tongue - but his mouth was passed over entirely in favor of the space between lip and nostril. It was mesmerizing, a bit, watching the rag come away crimson with each stroke. The blood was fresher, here, had barely stopped flowing. The man across from him looked just as rapt, focused with that fathomless gaze. He stopped the motion of the rag, held it to Sol’s nose. One moment, two, then Sol felt the weak warm pulse from his nose and knew the rag beneath it was blooming scarlet. 

The man gasped, a little hitching sound. His eyes were dark. His mouth was open. 

They each surged forward at the same time, meeting somewhere in the middle like the car crash Sol had seen when he was a kid, sudden and bloody. The man’s mouth was soft and biting under his, licking at Sol’s lips with zeal - licking up the blood, he realized with a zinging sort of shock. 

He ground down, tried to press the man into the sofa, but ended up somehow flipped onto his back with a hand rubbing over his clothed prick. With a sigh he went loose beneath the touch - he hadn’t expected a man this size and shape to want to be on top in any sense, but he wouldn’t object. There was a wonderful sort of powerlessness in simply letting himself be handled.

The man hovered light above him like some fairy visitor as he stripped off shirt and trousers in the dim glow of the lamp. Sol fumbled to follow suit, splaying his bare legs and hiking one up onto the cushions to cradle this man’s lithe little body with his own. He slotted in perfectly, burning a taut line up the center of Sol to kiss him again, again, again. 

The pill Sol had taken made his body open breathtakingly easily for this stranger’s long sure fingers - dulled the initial pain and made his muscles spool out around the intrusion. His looseness earned him a pleased smile, a lovely surprised sound. A murmured, “You _are_ eager,” when those fingers drummed over his prostate to make his hips clutch forward and his cock twitch upright against the hairy slope of his belly. And he was, he wanted it badly. He felt he was receiving a gift from this man, a most unexpected boon, a firm hand to guide him to rare pleasures. The pump of adrenaline that had been so urgent before was now slowed to a steady simmer by time and chemistry, just enough to make his limbs sing and his heart thud against the man’s injured arm where it was pressed flat to his sweating chest. 

He could feel the man’s slick prickhead bumping up against his entrance, now, along with the clutch of that one greased hand at the meat of his thigh. The man’s lips parted and he thought for a moment that he would be kissed again - looked forward to it - but the only contact he got as he was breached were those light eyes on him, mapping the glaze and gasp of his own face. Cutting through him like a knife, splitting him open front and back.

The burn of penetration was dulled somewhat by the pill he’d taken - a damned shame - so he relied on other measures of sensation, not willing to let thought back in just yet. There was the chemical-scented brush of the man’s hair against Sol’s face as it came unstuck from its slicked state, the white-pink press of teeth into the man’s bottom lip when he drove in hard, the quickly dissipating itch of nails raking over Sol’s thigh. There was the sound of it, the slap and suck like a filthy tide - the little huffs from the man, still remarkably composed for being bollocks deep - his own somewhat mortifying grunts and drawn-out groans. The rub of the sofa cushion on his bare arse, the sirens going by the window. It was grimy and dissolute and the hottest thing Sol had done in ages. 

The man built up into a rhythm of sharp and fast strokes, nipping at Sol’s lower lip more than he was kissing it. The constant rubbing over Sol’s prostate seemed almost secondary, but it was driving him loopy all the same, making him tense and leak and gasp. The man reached down to get a hand round Sol’s neglected cock, squeezing and stroking, at the same time as his other hand - the injured one, splayed across the damp thatch of his chest - latched onto his nipple, and Sol saw sparks. He was dimly aware of clinging to the man’s shoulders as he came, pulling him close against him, holding on for dear life. He buried his nose in his neck - sweat, cologne, tobacco smoke - and shuddered out a sigh, a wordless thanks.

He felt underwater as the man kept fucking him - wrung out and content to float in a lazy little spiral of sexual exhaustion. He tipped his head up to offer his mouth, if the man wanted to kiss him again - but he did not. The warm rush of seed he felt fill him at last was a relief, as if he were attuned secondhand to this man’s physicality. He was collapsed upon unceremoniously, and they both lay there in their sweaty heap for some minutes.

He expected the man to leave fairly quickly, but he stayed on and on: mopping himself up with the clean end of the bloody rag, pulling trousers on but forgoing his shirt, cracking Sol’s window to light up a cigarette. Sol was almost expecting him to get up and rummage through the fridge next, but instead he turned to Sol and asked: “How’d you like to be rich?”

Sol frowned. “Wouldn’t we all?”

The man smiled back at him. “I should think so. You did well tonight, very impressive. Both out cold.”

“I. Thank you.” Sol felt a shine of pride despite himself. Odd, to be fucked arseways and then praised for his strength.

“You like fighting, don’t you?” Sol opened his mouth again, closed it. “You don’t need to respond. I could see it.” He leaned forward, the half-light of the lamp illuminating him in strange strokes. “Would you like to fight for me more often?”

“You asking me to join a boxing syndicate?”

The man gave a dry little laugh. “Let’s put it this way. I work with some very dangerous men, and they don’t always keep in line. Sometimes I do something they don’t like, or the other way ‘round. I could use a guy like you.”

Sol raised his eyebrows. “Why me?”

“Hmm. Besides the physical?” This with a casual squeeze to Sol’s upper arm, like he was inspecting a cut of meat. “You were a Marine, you said. How long out?”

Sol shrugged. “Six months.”

“And,” the man continued, looking pointedly around Sol’s dingy barely-lived-in flat with its secondhand furniture, eyes dipping to the bloody rag and the pill-bottle, “how’s that been?”

Sol sighed. He was a bit adrift, these days. And he needed money - he would probably keep getting in fights anyway, might as well get paid for it. And hell, the guy was attractive. He thought it might be worth getting into this, whatever the fuck it might be, just to have this man’s hands on him again, pleased with him. Kissing the blood from his mouth.

“Alright,” he said, then, “Wait. I have to know your name if I’m gonna be your...what, your bodyguard?”

“There he is.” The man smiled with all his crooked teeth, took another drag, blew it not out the window but into the room. “My name is Cornelius Hickey. My associates call me...well, all sorts of things. You, my friend, may call me Neil.” He stuck the cigarette between his teeth and extended his good hand. “And you?”

Sol stared at the hand for a long moment. Over the course of the evening it had been damp with blood, lube, water. It had thrown punches at men twice its owner’s size. It had been three fingers inside him not an hour ago. And it had lit a cigarette that would be setting off his smoke alarm, if he had one. 

Sol took it in his own and shook it. “Sol Tozer,” he said. “Pleasure doing business.”

**Author's Note:**

> Again, here is your obligatory "don't have sex without protection" edict. And your "if your nose is gushing blood after a fight, go to A&E" edict. Please don't do anything these fools are doing.


End file.
